Experts

The University of Minnesota Center for Sexual Health was started in 1970, starting as the Program for Human Sexuality.

Experts

Being a parent, it is not only an expectation but a duty to provide the best possible care for our kids. This is not limited to simply the care they receive when they are with us or even by us. We entrust our kids to many different people in their lives. This might be a day care provider, the school they attend, or the doctors they see.

The best advice we received was actually from my sister. A friend of a friend recommended a cleft surgeon from the Mayo Clinic. Now, living in Minnesota, we are quite lucky to have this world famous medical facility and the people that work there. We did not only get one expert, but a whole team of doctors to work with all of the different aspects that come with a child born with a cleft. It was amazing to see them work in harmony to find the best possible course of treatment, much of which is planned out for an entire 18 years of stages.

Having our other twin start off as gender non-conforming, and later becoming transgender, there is a whole new set of needs, but the expert list becomes quite a bit smaller. Needless to say, we still needed to do what was best for our child, and so our journey began to find the best experts for our child.

A child who is as young as ours is, at the present, is unique in the transgender world, it is often hard to find an actual “expert”. I feel that much of this is because parents are often so fixated on their child being “normal”, they will often ignore the cues given to them by their children, or worse yet, try and break them of these unique tendencies. This is often done behind closed doors, and sadly, pushes many of these children to have sad childhoods. They might fight their feelings for many years.

Often times, these children, will go into adulthood, trying to continue what their parents started, and are not able to be who they really are. They are finally able to break through the years of conditioning. I have heard this many times from adults who have transitioned late in life. I have met several transgender adults in person, and many break down to tears, seeing that our child is getting to be herself, which is what they always wanted. Our child has been told time and again, just how lucky she is to be supported unconditionally and without judgment.

We hope what we do know will help other families understand, and seek out their own experts. Needless to say, the number of experts in this field are fewer and farther between than the experts for other medical conditions.

We have been lucky so far.

The therapist we originally went to regarding our child’s behavioral issues, noticed 30 seconds into our first session that our child was gender non-conforming, although the topic only came up 45 minutes later. Living in such a small town, we were lucky to have such an intuitive psychologist, as well as one who had 10 years experience working with transgender adults. He did not, however, have experience work with transgender children, so our “expert”, had some learning to do.

Thankfully, he was up to the task.

We also had to work with other medical professionals.

We had a prescribing psychiatrist, who also had no experience, but he too, took on the task of finding materials that could aid in understanding our child. Although our child’s pediatrician had yet to meet a child like Hayden, he quickly found the needed medical materials to ensure he was ready and able to understand her unique needs. He was also thoughtful enough to recommend and refer us to the University of Minnesota Medical Center, which has an entire group that has extensive experience working with people who are transgender.

This brought us to our next big step.

Although our child is quite young, we knew we needed to prepare for the future. All of the people who have worked with Hayden will become part of a team. This team will assist us in ensuring that we are providing the right mental health and medical care for our child. Just as we have planned for her brother’s cleft care for the present and the future, we are doing the same for our transgender daughter.

What does this all mean.

We hope that people will see that the medical choices we make for our son are just the same as the medical choices we make for our daughter; that what we are doing isn’t based on our feelings and our wants, but on the needs of our child.

We want people to see and understand that we would do the same thing any parent would do for their child with a medical need. This is a medical condition, but there is a lot of misinformation and personal prejudice we face because of the decisions we make for our daughter’s health.

Having an opinion about what we do does not make someone an expert.

People need to walk in our shoes, or at the very least, try to learn all they can about what transgender means – before they can make a judgment about the medical choices made for our daughter.

We have found experts to provide the care and treatment of our child, and other can read what experts have written. We hope that they will.

Todd Johnson-Haase

Father to a transgender child and advocate for the transgender community.

3 Responses

Todd, what a great article. It’s true that both of your twins are very lucky to have such intelligent, dedicated parents who are willing to learn new information and challenge medical and psychological professionals to do the same.

As a former speech pathologist some of my most satisfying and successful work was done in a team setting that involved multiple professionals and worked intimately with the family as an integral part of the team.

From that past experience I can relate to your long term team approach in working to make Hayden’s life and the expression of her full potential as smooth and successful as possible.

As a family you’ve shown amazing sensitivity and willingness to tackle difficult choices in the interest of the most important team members, your children. At some point, if your family dynamics allows it I’d love to hear the perspective of the twin’s mother as well.